Editorial standards

Our role

baba News is an aggregator, not a newsroom. We do no original reporting and we do not check the newsrooms’ facts. Our editorial work is in deciding which outlets to follow, digesting their articles faithfully, grouping reports of the same event, and describing each outlet’s political lean as honestly as we can. Where we have an editorial judgment to make, this page explains how we make it.

How we select sources

We aim for breadth: every part of the Israeli press, not one corner of it. We read 44 newsrooms and 7 official sources in five languages: Hebrew, Arabic, Russian, English and French. We read the left, the centre and the right, the Haredi press and the Arab press, and the Russian-language, business and sports press, so a reader sees how each of them tells the same event. The full list is on our sources page.

We publish stories with an Israeli angle. A foreign wire story with none, such as another country’s weather or sports league, is left out even when an Israeli outlet ran it.

Digests without commentary

Including an outlet is not an endorsement of it, and digesting a story is not an endorsement of its claims. The digest of a newsroom’s article carries no opinion of ours: the AI model that writes it is told to keep a neutral tone, to add no commentary, and to add nothing that is not in the article. On every story we show the coverage of all the groups side by side so readers can judge for themselves. baba News is not affiliated with any outlet, party, government, or advocacy group.

What baba News says in its own voice

Some things here are not a digest of one newsroom’s article. The Desk, the Good Morning, Israel podcast, our posts on social media, the answers of Ask Duki, and the summary at the top of a full coverage page, which baba writes from the newsrooms’ reports, are baba News speaking. They are written by AI models from the stories we have collected, and they follow a house style.

In its own voice, baba News speaks as an Israeli outlet, and it writes its scripts and answers from that position. These are the rules of the house style:

• Hamas, Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and the Houthis are called terrorist organizations. An attack that Israeli authorities treat as terror is called a suspected or confirmed terror attack, and we say who says so.
• An accusation against Israel or its soldiers is reported as a claim. We name who makes it and give Israel’s response or the context beside it. We do not state it as fact.
• We do not use words such as “occupation”, “apartheid” or “genocide” as our own. Ask Duki and the full coverage summary say Judea and Samaria, not the West Bank.
• A story that is only a hostile account of Israel, with no Israeli angle worth telling, can be left out of a bulletin.
• Domestic politics, the courts, scandals, strikes and criticism of the government from inside Israel are ordinary news and are told plainly.

The house style decides words, order and emphasis in what we write ourselves. It does not change the facts a newsroom reported, which newsrooms we read, how we group them, what the coverage bar counts, or which stories are marked Not Everywhere.

How we group the press and assign lean

Every outlet sits in one of five groups: the left, the centre and the right, the Haredi press and the Arab press. The religious-Zionist press counts with the right, because on the political questions we track it frames the news the way the right-wing press does. The Haredi and Arab press have their own groups because each is a community with its own agenda, and neither sits honestly on a left-right line. Russian-language, business and sports outlets, and the few the evidence cannot place, sit outside the groups as other outlets: we list them, but a story is never said to be missing from them.

Each outlet also has its own lean (left, center, right, or unrated), which we assign by hand from its widely understood reputation and editorial posture. The group decides where the coverage bar counts an outlet; the lean is our rating of the outlet itself, shown on its source page. Not Everywhere verdicts are only about the left, the centre, the right and the Haredi press. When a story has fewer than two newsrooms in the left, the centre and the right, we do not claim a skew at all. Our methodology sets out each group in full.

These are judgments, not measurements; reasonable people will disagree, and we welcome challenges at news@itsbaba.com.

How stories are ranked

Stories are ranked by scores, not picked by an editor. The scores come from how much a story matters, how widely the press covered it, how fast it is spreading and how old it is. We can pin or hide a story by hand, and such an override always carries an expiry time. Our methodology describes the ranking, Trending and Most read.

Accuracy and the limits of AI

Digests, key points, lists of people and places, headline comparisons and tone readings on baba News are made by AI models. They are good, but they are not perfect and can contain errors, mistranslations, or missed nuance. Every article page says who made the text: “Translated & summarized from [newsroom] by baba”, or “Summarized from [newsroom] by baba” when the source is in the page’s own language. For any decision that matters, read the original article we link to. Our AI and translation policy covers this in detail, and our corrections page explains how we fix mistakes.

Independence

baba News is owned and paid for by ZipLyne LLC. The only things it sells are News Plus, a reader subscription, and its developer API. It carries no advertising and runs no sponsored stories. It takes no money or editorial direction from the outlets it covers or from any outside interest. No source pays to be included, excluded, or described a particular way.

Respect for the original

We credit and link to every source, and we treat their work as theirs. We publish our own digest and never the newsroom’s article text. For a report published in English, we show key points and the link and no body of our own. Newsroom clips and photos are shown through the platform’s own embed of the newsroom’s post. The one exception is an Instagram Reel attached to a story, which we copy and keep for up to 30 days because Instagram’s embed does not load for some readers. Photos released by the IDF Spokesperson and Magen David Adom are shown with their credit. The copyright in the original articles belongs to the respective newsrooms; see our terms for how we handle rights and takedowns.